Obama knew about Russian “meddling” but took no action . . . until after Trump won

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. The Russia meddling with the 2016 election has been a bone of #Resistance contention since the election day “upset” that stunned everyone but those across America who saw something in Trump and believed in him.

I wasn’t one of those people; I was among the stunned. Even as I trudged reluctantly to the polls to cast my vote for Trump, I thought Hillary would win even as I fervently hoped and prayed she would not. I was unspeakably joyous when Trump won.

So when the story started to evolve from Trump actively colluding with Russia to secure his victory to “the big story” being Russian “influence” on the election via hacking, social media outlets/bots, and random crazy stories designed to gin up mostly-existing angst, I thought, wait a minute, we’ve moved from Trump being the perpetrator of a potential federal crime to . . . the Obama White House actively doing nothing about Russian “interference” in the 2016 election?

After all, how can Trump be responsible for election tampering of the type alleged if he was just another presidential candidate? He didn’t hold the reigns of power. Obama did.

And we know that Obama knew about Russian interference in our election process; it wasn’t quite as blatant as Obama’s own attempt to meddle in the Israeli election, but he had to have—as president—been made aware. Yet he did nothing.

These Russian individuals did their work during the Obama years. Why didn’t Obama do something about it? Because he thought Crooked Hillary Clinton would win, that’s why. Had nothing to do with the Trump Administration, but Fake News doesn’t want to report the truth, as usual!

After all, it wasn’t until December 2016 that Obama issued (relatively mild) sanctions against Russia for the “meddling,” and the move was clearly more about saving face than about any penalizing or even deterrent message.

So it’s not at all unreasonable for President Trump to question what his predecessor did about the Russian “meddling” that took place under Obama’s watch.

The stories you heard about the 12 Russians yesterday took place during the Obama Administration, not the Trump Administration. Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?

It’s a good question. Given that there has thus far been no “collusion” proven or seriously alleged against President Trump or his team and that the accusations seem to be shifting to some sort of Russian tampering with our elections on Trump’s behalf, it’s not unreasonable to ask what did Obama do about this going on under his nose and on his watch?

President Trump on Saturday reacted to the indictment of 12 Russian military officers “for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election” by blaming former President Obama and the “deep state.”

….Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?

Considering that then-GOP presidential candidate Trump, as a private citizen, had no means of interfering in the U. S. election, shouldn’t the onus fall on the sitting president, the one who did have the means of knowing what Russia was up to, the one who after Trump won sanctioned, albeit weakly, Russia for this very offense? It was Obama, after all, who expelled 35 Russian diplomats for election tampering . . . in December 2016.

Ultimately, this all seems to be bubbling to the surface in anticipation of an upcoming U. S. Senate report that will reportedly slam Obama for his failures with regard to Russian interference in the election.

A bipartisan group of senators is expected to slam former President Barack Obama’s administration for its response to Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting an investigation into the government’s response to Russian election meddling, has already criticized the Department of Homeland Security for its “inadequate” defense against the hacking effort.

. . . . There had been indications the panel would formally criticize the Obama administration’s response. The committee’s vice chair, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called the administration’s handling of Russian election interference “flat-footed” during a June 20 hearing on Russian interference in U.S. elections.

“Our collective response was inadequate to meet Russia’s escalation,” Warner said, though he noted that he believed President Donald Trump also deserved blame because of his claims as a candidate that the election had been rigged.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the committee’s Republican chairman, said during the hearing that Obama officials appeared to be operating “without a playbook.”

Shifting the narrative from vague accusations of Trump campaign collusion (of which no evidence has, to date, been found) to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election leads to only one culpable—or at the very least naively disinterested—party: Obama.

Comments

The Obama party of Marxists love the commies, always have, always will. Their current indignation is just political show. They’ll revert to collusion with the Russian commies to end democracy and destroy our republic in the first moment they gain power again.

Barry, you have so nailed what is driving me crazy about this whole leftist attack on Russia. They are ideologicial soulmates . . . well, if one stupid as heck American loon steeped in SJW lunacy meets an actual commie.

Russia is playing the heck out of the left (and of the right) and laughing their butts off the whole way. Why wouldn’t they? They have commies disavowing commies and limited government free market republicans (small “r”) embracing commies. They have to be on Cloud 9 dancing the happiest of happy dances.

They don’t care which side “wins” here; they think they will win in the end.

The Muh Russia thing is just a coverup for the Obama admin using the highest levels of spying to change the outcome of an election. It’s really that simple. The F.B.I. never looked at the DNC server and it never was going to. The rest of this is just a story to keep the media screaming at the top of their lungs and creating news as they see fit. Covering up for the former President is what they do best.

A bipartisan group of senators is expected to slam former President Barack Obama’s administration

Not expected by me, certainly. “Bipartisan” has a special meaning in Washington politics; it means “riddled with D’rat saboteurs.” And D’rats are strict Party men, whether the Party is the Dems or the Reds. In that sense, they’re as “flexible” as Obama himself.

As it turned out, the election had been rigged, in part to screw over Bernie Sanders and in part to subvert a legitimate administration by loading Federal agencies with partizen hacks. There has not been anywhere near enough swamp draining.

Personally, I think that whole “home brew” bathroom-server idiocy was a set-up to LET ALL THE HACKERS IN. Why else do what she did?! She broke so many laws, and yet Comey and Strzok LET HER GO. And Mueller is STILL going on his witch hunt, trying to destroy Trump (which Jeff Sessions should STOP right now, as it has produced NOTHING, not one bit of evidence to show the Trump campaign did anything wrong, or colluded.

“Personally, I think that whole “home brew” bathroom-server idiocy was a set-up to LET ALL THE HACKERS IN. Why else do what she did?!”

IMHO, the purpose of the private server was to keep HRC’s communications out of official government servers, where they would have been stored forever, and give her total control over those communications. She simply wanted to make sure that no one had access to her communications, who she did not authorize.

Now, HRC is not the sharpest crayon in the box. It never occurred to her that the people with whom she communicated might be hacked, or that her trusted aide, Huma, would forward all of these communications to her personal laptop which she then left in the possession of the infamous Carlos Danger. But, she is still being protected by the establishment.

Naivete? Yes. It was there in spades. The first thing you learn, in any improper, illegal or criminal enterprise is never trust ANYONE else with incriminating information. Yet, just like every other “criminal mastermind” in history, she lost control of incriminating material by sending it to others and allowing “trusted” people to have authorized access to it. If she had wanted the information on her server to be available to anyone who wanted it, she would not have gone to the trouble of wiping the memory, having her legal team vet the emails and destroy what they wanted and then attempting to paint herself as a naive dolt. She knew what she was doing, she just did not expect others to compromise her “security”.

Oh yes. Corruption and espionage brought into the 21st century. And she wouldn’t even need the usual bag men, thus increasing her personal security and safety; e-mail is a relatively safe way to send whatever classified info a paying customer wanted without the risks of conventional methods … xeroxes in a paper bag left on a park bench, coded ads in the “classified” section of the newspaper, etc. All she had to do was check that the required donation had been made to the Clinton Crime Fund, then attach the classified info to an e-mail sent to her leaky server … and give the customer’s intel people time to read it there. Then delete it. And repeat … 30,000 times.

And if anyone caught wind of it, play techno-idiot—sure, she’s just a dumb ol’ lady, what would she know about this computer stuff?

The answer to the question is simple. The impact that the Russian government had on the election was minimal to nonexistent. Obama’s actions against Russian, post-election, were all part of the “insurance policy” to be used against Trump.

The Russian meddling meme was designed to do two things; to lend credence to claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and that that collusion is what led to the defeat of HRC AND to provide cover for the illegal surveillance of Trump, his campaign and other Americans, for political purposes, going back to early 2015. And, it is still being used for those purposes today.

Obama did. He backed the terrorists in the Levant. He backed the coup in Ukraine. Soviets… I mean, Russians, unfriended him on Facebook, and the Left have been on a multi-trimester baby hunt ever since.

“After all, how can Trump be responsible for election tampering of the type alleged if he was just another presidential candidate?”

Because he, Trump, was, on that day, that most powerful of individuals, a private citizen of the United States of America. If I had had the microphone, and a burlysharp audience of twenty five (?) million Americans, and astute enough to figure, I’d have asked the same question: The Obama-serve people can’t seem to figure out how to access Ms Clinton’s hard drive; will y’all help?

If the Russian agents provide transparent opticals into the arcane practices of Obama-Clinton socialists, I will lean on them in a trust-but-verify environment.

Obama did do something about it; he organized the IC/FBI/DOJ to instigate a cover-up of his party’s use of the FBI/NSA databases for political purposes. The DNC ‘hack’ was much more likely an internal affair (probably a Bernie fan) than a Russian one.

The DNC never did give the FBI access to the hacked servers; instead they call in their private contractors, Crowdstrike, to analyze their servers. So who is Crowdstrike? The founder was Dimitry Alperovich, a George Soros associate and Shawn Henry, Chief Security Officer, previously FBI’s Executive Assistant Director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, appointed by Robert Mueller. Crowdstrike’s first round of funding came from none other than George Soros and its last round of $100 million came from Google.

The special Council took Crowdstrike’s assessment of the DNC server at face value, hence Mueller’s latest indictments. Now most ‘experts’ know that assigning blame for computer hacks is more art than science. The analysts try to identify styles and code fragments that have identifiable sources and assign probable guilt through these fingerprints.

But those days are long over, the NSA lost control of one of its best hacking tool kits and they now wander cloud for anyone to pick up and use. These tools include most ‘fingerprints’ used to assign culpability allowing these fingerprints to be used by anyone to point the blame at anyone else. In other words there is no way to identify the hacker unless the hacker makes some very serious mistakes, like a bank robber leaving his wallet on the counter.

Please, somebody fit this into sanity. Brian Williams has announced that Trump will not do well in the Putin-private meeting in Helsinki on Monday because there will be only “a *finite* number of Russians in the room.”

Only a finite number of Russians in the room. Finite.

Damn, sons, there are way more Russians in the universe than Mr Obama ever divulged to us.

This is an intelligence operation. Indicting Russians who will never step foot in a courtroom is just Mueller showing he’s doing something besides threatening to indict Flynn’s son making Flynn plead guilty to a process crime. Why let the Russians know what we know about what they are doing? They will just move to something else. John McCain has to first retire and second shut up.

In fact, the Obama Administration initiated a counterintelligence operation, and informed the candidates about possible infiltration of their campaigns. They also wanted to make a public statement to encourage states to defend against interference, but were stymied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Later, Trump fired the head of the FBI overseeing the counterintelligence operation saying it was over “this Russia thing”.

Zachs, you misunderstand my point. The fake news is the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia; that doesn’t mean that Russia didn’t try to influence the 2016 election (just as they have every other U. S. election going back decades). Of course they did; I have no idea why Trump is saying otherwise. My guess is that he, like you, is conflating two separate accusations: one, that Trump or his team colluded with Russia to win the presidency and two, that Russia tried to influence our election. But who knows? He may actually think that Russia did not attempt to meddle in our election. I doubt he’s that stupid, but he might be.

My point of view on this is the same as it was when the right melted down over news that the U. S. was tapping Angela Merkel’s phones. “ZOMG! The Americans are SPYING on the Germans, our allies! The horror!” Hmph. That was a NSS thing just as is Russia’s attempts to influence our election. As Rand Paul said, “everyone does it.” And everyone does. Including the U. S. and Russia. That goes for phone tapping of allies’ and enemies’ phones as well as election meddling.

The only way Russian meddling would matter at all is if they had somehow hacked voting machines and changed votes for Hillary to Trump or something along those lines. Simply writing on some Russian-based site or FB page or Twitter account that Hillary has some kind of debilitating health problem or whatever doesn’t matter to normal people. It strengthens anti-Clinton fervor in those already adamantly opposed to her, but no one else would either a.) believe it or b.) care. For example, I’ve loathed Hillary since the 90s, and there was nothing anyone anywhere could say or do that would change that. She is what she is, and it’s vile. A thousand Russian bots pummeling with stories about how great she was wouldn’t have any impact at all (beyond my blocking them); indeed, the NYT and CNN doing so didn’t sway me, so why would some anonymous article on some obscure site do so?

In other words, as I note in my post, as well, Russia has been accused of pushing fake news stories and employing bots, etc. to spread their stories and to heighten division in America. They did this, by the way, on the left, too, and with arguably more success because Bernie, a life-long Russophile is now seen as the wronged party in the DNC scandal, and his ideas, which if you hadn’t noticed are pretty much identical to Russia’s, are being foregrounded in the Dem party. Yet I don’t blame Russia for the horrific leftward lunge of the Socialist Democrats; they’re free-thinkers (until they manage to get their agenda off the ground, anyway).

The only evidence of infiltration into 2016 presidential campaigns I’ve seen was Obama’s FBI into the Trump campaign. There was no way for the Russians to “hack” our national election system because we don’t have one; I can’t imagine that every single state isn’t hyper-vigilant about election monitoring, if for no other reason than to avoid a whole slew of dead people and cartoon characters voting for Hillary or “lost” ballots (for the Democrat) suddenly being found.

If Trump colluded with Russia to win the election, I will be first in line screaming about it. IF we’re all wee wee’d up because Russia attempted to influence our election for the millionth election in a row, count me out. They may have better resources with the internet, but propaganda is propaganda, and only the most wild-eyed fringers on both sides put any stock in it. And they aren’t winnable by the other side, anyway. Russia can push stories about Hillary being an alien from Planet Pantsuit or about Democrats all being members of a Satanic cult replete with their own special handshake all day long as far I’m concerned.

So no, I ultimately don’t even care that Obama did so little about it. What I care about is that the narrative is not only inaccurate but hypocritical in the extreme. If the call is to eviscerate Trump for Russian meddling in the 2016 election, then the guy picking up that phone is Obama not Trump. That, I care about.

The fact is that the Russians are using cyber-warfare against the U.S. and other countries. That warrants an investigation. Trump calls it a “witch hunt”, undercutting those trying to determine what happened and how to prevent further incursions.

The Russians also militarily invaded a sovereign country, then lied about it. They are engaging in a widespread campaign to destabilize open, democratic societies.

Fuzzy Slippers: The only evidence of infiltration into 2016 presidential campaigns I’ve seen was Obama’s FBI into the Trump campaign.

That’s clearly not the case. Russia illegally hacked into the DNC, then released the information to cause maximum political damage to Clinton.

Fuzzy Slippers: There was no way for the Russians to “hack” our national election system because we don’t have one.

No, but there are state systems which were infiltrated.

Fuzzy Slippers: Russia can push stories about Hillary being an alien from Planet Pantsuit

Or push a story that the Pope endorsed Trump, and target Catholic areas.

As a Social Worker I’ve spent most of my career in the non-profit sector and always felt Pres. Obama was like many of the Directors and Board Presidents I’ve worked with. It was always about optics and words. Provided they could sell to people that everything was good then little was done. Think about it:

Cash 4 Clunkers – didn’t change the average fuel economy, took serviceable used vehicles off the market, pushed the price of used parts up (both hurting poor people) and the administration had to admit it didn’t work.

Green Energy – 79% of all companies that received funding went bankrupt once the funding dried up.

Russia – took Crimea and we did nothing.

ACA – cost didn’t go down.

Employment – historic highs for minority unemployment.

I could go on but why. . . .media and many voters ignore it because Obama was just so amazingly great! When I think about the Russian Election Interference issue I remember three things:

1. In March ’17 the CIA testified before Congress and stated they’d informed the administration in 09, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 and 16 that Russia was using social media to disrupt opinion and some dissent and the administration took no action.

2. In ’12 when Gov. Romney said Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe, Pres. Obama laughed and said, “Mitt, the 80’s have called and would like there foreign policy back”.

3. Pres. Obama on the hot mic promising more “flexibility”.

I also think how contorted all of this has become and how ignorantly folks just accept it! So back in ’16 we were told that every single intelligence agency agreed Russia hacked into the DNC. They agreed on this not because they did any independent investigation but because CrowdStrike wrote a report and said so – because remember, nobody from the federal government – according to Jeh Johnson and Donna Schalala (sp? Sorry) stated that no government agency examined the DNC server. Interesting. Flash forward to last Friday and the DOJ now says the Russians stole the DNC emails via a phishing campaign and were able to get valid DNC users to respond. Hey, that’s not a hack and it required an affirmative response by a user – but, lets not get bogged down with semantics, right!

We now know that the ICIG informed the FBI during the Clinton server investigation that a foreign body had captured over 30,000 emails from the Clinton server including those that were classified. Yet Comey said, it could’ve happen. Obama said it really wasn’t a big deal because there’s classified and then there’s “classified” – whatever the heck that meant.

We know that AG Holder, Sec Jackson, Sec Sebulis, Ms. Learner and Pres. Obama all used off the books, fake, email addresses. Heck, Obama even exchanged emails with Sec Clinton through the Clinton server! But. . . .none of this is important – even if the ICIG says a foreign body collected all of those emails and even if a convicted sex offender was found to be in the custody of said emails! Because there isn’t a “smidgen” of problems and all looks good – Obama said so!

The “stories” really are ridiculous if you look at them. The Russians influenced the election yet in Mullers court filings a large number of the social media post were written in Russian and the Special Counsels office didn’t provide translated copies! So the average American was doing what, bouncing back and forth with babblefish to translate and THEN being influenced! Heck, Facebook admitted the Russian trolls were responsible for the anti-Trump “not my President” rallies atrended by celebrities. Moreover the Russian trolls were promoting anti-police, pro-BLM propaganda according to Zuckerburg! But according to Democrats and the media Russians were all in the tank for Trump! No, they were all in the tank to do exactly what the CIA testified before Congress – sow dissent – it worked and us continuing to work thanks to the “useful idiots” that promote a narrative that’s unsupported by evidence.

Sure, Mueller has Popodapolous, Flynn and Van Der Wernt all on process crimes of lying to the FBI! Flynn, in particular, is interesting because Comey testified before Congress the agents doing the interview didn’t believe Flynn was being deceptive! Yeah, Mueller has Gates but those are crimes that occurred years ago and have nothing to do with the campaign or the 16 electiin! Manifort will go to trial and I predict he’ll lose and when he does folks ought to remember none if those crimes were part of the campaign or election!

But. . . .the sell will be “appearance” and will evoke the true Obamaism of “fighting the good fight”. Really, the fight they ignored when the CIA told them? The fight Obama laughed about when Romney brought it up? It’s funny democrats will whine about the “apperance” when it comes to all things Trump but a Democrat congressman just said Mr. Strzok deserves the “purple heart” after all he’s been through!

Couldn’t that be asked of EVERYTHING obama was confronted with? He had eight years of absolutely no action through Congress except obamacare and that has basically been repealed. We have all seen the obama list of things he screwed up so I guess one more is no biggie.

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